Facebook postings from someone who doesn’t need to get a job

by philg

The First Amendment doesn’t apply to anyone who needs to hold onto or get a W-2 job. Expressing a politically unpopular or unacceptable idea puts an employee on a greased slide to the front door.

Here’s a recent Facebook posting from a friend who runs his own business:

Sent my 6-year-old daughter to buy something Target so that she could learn to be independent. I waited about 30 feet away as she checked out some Pokemon cards on her own using my credit card.

From this ensued a discussion among his friends regarding the pros and cons of free range children. Example:

Given that folks have been charged for letting their 9 year olds play in the street with out the parents being there, I would be cautious. Also, use cash. You are technically the only one that can use that card.

The self-employed original poster then noted

I am 100% sure my kids would not run into a wild animal exhibit and jump down a 15 foot concrete wall to enter a moat.

(Reference to an incident that led to the shooting death of Harambe, an endangered gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo.)

17 thoughts on “Facebook postings from someone who doesn’t need to get a job”

  1. Idiot commenter wrote: “You are technically the only one that can use that card.”

    Bzzzzt… WRONG! Anyone authorized by the card accountholder may use the card (and the accountholder is responsible for the bill, though nothing forbids him to accept (p)reimbursement from that authorized user).

  3. I work at a company that would absolutely fire me if my opinions about certain liberal agenda items were expressed and pointed out to them. I’m also certain that those kinds of opinions, posted to my personal web site, cost me at least one job, and perhaps one other, in my last job search.

    I’ve since redacted all political and religious topics from my public site, but still write what I want on a version of the site which is private. It’s become my digital journal, and I vent my spleen there when I just can’t put my name to something publicly, or don’t want to waste karma getting down voted on some stupid social network, every one of which has been captured by liberalism. Some day, when I don’t feel beholden to a paycheck, I’ll make it public again.

    You can claim that some level of discussion about some particular topic may or may not be serious grounds for poor treatment up to and including dismissal, but the fact that were having a conversation about the particulars means the battle is already lost to political correctness censoring free speech.

  4. Phil,
              the way you frame the issues (of parental leeway?) appears totally unrelated to the title and the leading sentences of your post – at least to this European with but nominal understanding of what the First Amendment stands for… though possibly that context is unambiguously clear to your American readers.

    That said, here’s a WAY OFF TOPIC UPDATE to the earlier, closed-comments thread about the promise and valuation of Theranos’ med.technology: “Elizabeth Holmes’s fall from hero to zero highlights problems of rich lists.” The higher they climb…

  6. My hamster is smarter than that particular kid. I fail to see what race has to do with it.

  7. My nephew is white and I can totally see him falling into a gorilla cage.

  8. Explainer Boi is apparently giving the “liberal” view of how Facebooker’s post would be interpreted as posted.

  10. There is no doubt that social media is a modern day Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (aka Stasi) of East Germany. The most surprising thing is that the censorship is coming from the ‘liberal’ left. No one can speak openly for fear of offending the current liberal zeitgeist. And most of the thought police – those that I fear taking offence to something I might write – are women. I don’t fear the men – I fear the women. Could it be that I make too many social media ‘friends’ with liberal women and moderate men?

    I am in full support of women’s, gay’s, children’s and gorillas’ rights. However, I have a problem with the victim culture. Mostly because I think calling wolf on every little offence is just ridiculous. But I dare not open my mouth too much, because of fear. People just cannot take a joke these days.

  12. “I waited about 30 feet away” and “From this ensued a discussion among his friends regarding the pros and cons of free range children.”

    30 feet away. Free range. Them folks give a new meaning to dumb. Aye.

  13. So called Liberals completely miss the irony of their censorship. The other day I watched the Trumbo movie with my MIL (actually better than I thought it would be at first – in the 1st half hour Trumbo explains to his little daughter how Communism is just like sharing your sandwich with your schoolmates, but then it achieves some depth) and after she was done tut-tutting about the blacklist, I happened to switch on the TV to the local news on the Fox affiliate station and she recoiled in horror as if watching Fox for 5 minutes would burn her eyes.

  14. @SuperMike #7—you should totally get legal custody of that your nephew and then leverage his abilities to act STUPID WHILE WHITE by having him repeatedly fall into a tame (toothless/ muscle-relaxant-saturated) gorilla’s enclosure in a circus or something in front of paying public. A SENSATION!!!. During school holidays, I mean… teach the kid to know his worth, how to monetize it, and that, just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, his uncle’s love doesn’t come for free either.

    @GermanL #10 – welcome to the club. While I don’t use Fuckfacebook, I experienced something not too dissimilar on Twitter which by the v. nature of its metier, the parsimony of message bandwidth, doesn’t invite lengthy, hence potentially overtly “offensive” diatribes. I posted under a female name (initially a tribute to a obscure literary ♀ character; later for legacy reasons), but made sure never to speak out/ identify myself as a woman—which I’m not. After all, I was there to promote genderless ideas, not to pick-up lesbian ⚢ babes, or make-believe redress injustices in life.

    During my active time there I was involved in several mega-strifes with perhaps up to a dozen concurrent opponents each. I observed one thing: even very heated exchanges with male ♂ men, who oftentimes couldn’t deliver coherent arguments, thus petered out, seldom ended up with me being blocked. On the other hand, mere whiff of a (single or a couple tweets) opposing a fellow ♀ twitterer’s POV very often led to outright blockage. And yet, those whom I tried to interact with weren’t exactly of the a-verbal type, but journalists whose larger world view I may have shared, only here tried to present them with some dissenting opinion, usually against woman-eternal-victim stereotype.       Subsequently I’ve been blocked by several Guardianistas such as the standard bearer of female victimhood @JessicaValenti; @HadleyFreeman; R.I.P. Jenny @diski, of whose oeuvre I only ever wrote in superlatives, and do not remember interacting with. Also (surprise! surprise!) the supposedly über-groovy and oh-so-mondaine @CaitlinMoran.

    As nothing I messaged any of them could be called offensive in any moral or conversational sense (why would I be doing that when I manage otherwise just fine?), neither can I say what it was that made them reach for the BLOCK button (perhaps the ease with which it can be done, and the last one’s half-a-million followers had something to do[sic!] with it?) Else, what I tweeted must’ve been such an disturbing, DISRUPTING(?) intellectual obstacle in their ways, that to counter it in style they’d first have to perform an anatomically impossible act on themselves (brain surgery, say, ye pervos!). Blocking me was their only viable course of action, the modern-day equivalent of banishment for iconoclasm from their vicinity. Yet if that was the case, then those women’s entire thoughtverse must rest on clay feet… so unsteady that one heretic tweet can unseat it.

    I say women, because, by and large, female Twitterers seem much faster to take offense of civil opinions not to their liking, than do male Twitter-handle counterparts. I’ve been blocked by some gal in Tel-aviv for insufficiently pro-Israeli stance, then immediately mass-cascade-blocked by (I think) her ⚢ followers. Nothing like that from male Twitter (even hardcore Zionist) Israelis has ever happened.

    In another case, I disagreed with some guy’s mildly favourable opinion of the Nazi TV agitprop known as “Generation War” in the UK (ZDF “Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter”). We had a civil exchange over that, and that was it—what Twitter is for. Then I was made aware that the guy I so offhandedly spoke with was an actor in some fantasy historical multi-season TV series that I never heard of; famous for his character walking shirtless there, which was the base for his large near exclusively middle-age female Twitter following. And here this in his timeline hitherto never heard of “female” not only addresseses HIM as were they equals, but also DARES to disagree with HIM on p.o.i.n.t.s!!!. Moreover, HE concedes that he might’ve been too liberal with the praise of that other series! It’s like I raped his mind from afar or something… I discover that they gossip about me behind my Twitter back, without linking to my handle (thus undiscoverable by mention or keyword search). So I call them all a “pre-post-menopausal” bunch, who should’ve know better than to venerate an actor like that. Uh-oh, blocked by the lot ;-))

  15. Smartest – I’m afraid you will then be “Formerly Smartest Woman on the Interweb”. Facebook is the new TV for sucking out brain cells.

    My kids are learning to count money by paying at restaurants (out of my sight) and stores. I also try to give them some independent space while playing. Many random people in public are uncomfortable with it. Two examples:

    I was hiking with my girls, 5 and 3 years old, in local state park. I let them walk ahead some, maybe 50 yards. A girl-scout troop passed by and the leaders were very upset that I wasn’t walking right with them, and they stopped their hike to wait for me to catch up to keep my girls out of danger.

    Also, I have had a complete stranger who was driving by the front of my house stop her car and knock on my front door to let me know my kids were playing in our front yard unsupervised.

  16. Don’t get me wrong. I love the posts about the casual conversations with the upper class liberal New England crowd.. but I do wonder;

    Are your friends ever bothered when you share the stories they tell at parties or their facebook posts?

  17. @ Sam (cc: other FB dwellers),
                                                      from what you say, at least where middle age/ class Americans are concerned, Facebook must be that bad money that drove out the good. So why do you stay… because of the networking effects, the odd chance to reconnect with some peripheral people from way past, and the ability to socially stalk your exes/ dream-SOs (=what FB really is for), all that outweighing the collective dumbing-down of opinions that ensue?

    I don’t partake in any forum where I’d be evaluated numerically or with clicks and “Likes”, only write occasionally here, and in one other blog, yet I can’t complain of having lots of free time left over from net.surfing.

    Apart from Twitter for a while, the only other so-so-social medium that I participated in was the FriendFeed (a snapshot of sample feed), a precursor to FB in a sense, but without the wall ornaments and other than minimal voting fluff. Sadly, in 2009 or so the entire small team incl. the inventor of Gmail, @Paul Buchheit, was bought up by FB, the FF development stopped, and then the orphaned service website worked more or less sans maintenance for 5+ years before it finally was shut down. It was an uncluttered pleasure to use… I have fond memories of it, no less because nobody there ever tried to sell my online presence elsewhere… either to potential net.penpals or to advertisers. Perhaps that’s why this good money was driven out by the bad.

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